Xmas Stats and Matchday 21: Back to the league

Isn't rheumatoid arthritis great!

Well, I don't exactly mean great. Certainly not from my perspective, and definitely not from a sufferer's perspective. However, learning about it for the 93rd time in a week meant that I could use my time to finally sit down and hammer out the stats from the last 5 games.

As my football viewing over Xmas was limited to 23 minutes of Sunderland vs Everton (before I fell asleep), and a few snatched highlights off 101greatgoals, I didn't really feel I was in a position to comment on games, villains etc. It'd have been quite tedious for everyone to have sat through a mega blog post breaking down the stats matchday by matchday. Therefore, I thought I'd synopsise in true F365 style, with my "16 conclusions of the Impossibilitee Xmas"*

• Do you lot need your mothers to get you up in the mornings? I go away for a few short weeks, and without my nagging, numbers dropped by half!
• On that note, those of you who only gave one set of predictions to a blog post with 2 sets of fixtures in it....absolutely baffled! How long would it have taken to do the 2nd set! Complaint over
• All in all, we were rubbish over Xmas. The average score was a smidgen over 4. By contrast, the season average is 4.66. Does this suggest that the fixture congestion throws up crazy results, or are we all just a bit jaded?
• Boxing Day was the worst matchday of the season to date, with an average score of 3. Even the lunacy of the next set of matches when Chelsea, Man Utd and Man City all lost wasn't as terrible, scoring an average of 3.43.
• Individually, JT scored the highest over the 6 matches, with an 8 in the 1st week.
• Lowest scores were Lawro and Sam Ruback with 1.
• Joe Miller has opened up a decent lead at the top. Thanks for putting the message out whilst I was away.
• The rest of the table is still very congested. Lots still to play for.
• It feels a bit Moneyball-y. By this I mean that the numbers disagree with my intuition as to how everyone did. When I was working all this out, I thought some did better than they actually did, and thought others (myself included) did worse.

*If you want to know why this doesn't add up to 16, then you don't read F365. Your loss (most of the time). Great article today about homophobia in football.

Here are the average scores for those who played 2 or more rounds over Xmas. JT, Will O'Doherty and Josh Daniels get gold stars. Sam Ruback get the lump of coal.

The new table is below. Ryan missed 1 week to many, so has dropped out, but he and 1 or 2 others should join next week if they play. To summarise, other than the 3 with the gold stars above, everyone else went down. It's pretty tightly contested however.

To make up for the rush last week, I'm putting the predictions out now in plenty of time.

Blackburn vs Fulham - DRAW

Chelsea vs Sunderland - CHELSEA

Aston Villa vs Everton - EVERTON

Spurs vs Wolves - SPURS

WBA vs Norwich - NORWICH

Liverpool vs Stoke - STOKE

Man Utd vs Bolton - MAN UTD

Newcastle vs QPR - NEWCASTLE

Swansea vs Arsenal - ARSENAL

Wigan vs Man City - MAN CITY

Total odds: 2422/1 with PaddyPower.

The Spurs vs Everton game this week from the opening day is being ignored, as not enough people made predictions back then for me to include it fairly.

Predos in the comments below as per usual - it's a new year and let's get back on track!

Finally, if anyone is/knows a web developer who is footy mad (or otherwise willing to work for beer), please pass them my way. I'm looking to develop this for next season and want to run ideas past someone technical. Any RTs/reccommendations to that effect will be gratefully received, and may result in said beer for you!

Good luck guys!